Featured Links - September 12, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

• Obnoxiously Large Satellite Could Mean Bad News for Astronomers Observing the Skies. "AST SpaceMobile's BlueWalker 3 is scheduled to launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on September 10." As if the Starlink satellite constellation wasn't enough of a headache for astronomers, these satellites will be much brighter.
• New Super-Powerful Solar Telescope Captures Detailed Photos of the Sun. "New Super-Powerful Solar Telescope Captures Detailed Photos of the Sun."
• September 2022 La Niña update: it’s Q & A time. "Ocean and atmospheric conditions tell us that La Niña—the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern—currently reigns in the tropical Pacific. It’s looking very likely that the long-predicted third consecutive La Niña winter will happen, with a 91% chance of La Niña through September–November and an 80% chance through the early winter (November–January)."
• This Summer’s Drought Is Europe’s Worst in 500 Years. What Happened Last Time? "The 1540 megadrought brought mass suffering to the continent, but European society quickly bounced back."
• It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy. "The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism."
• I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah. "I grew up in the far-right evangelical conservative (Christofascist) movement; specifically, I was homeschooled and my parents were part of a subculture called Quiverfull, whose aim is to outbreed everyone for Jesus. I spent my teen years being a political activist. I was taught by every pastor I encountered that it was our job as Christians to outbreed the secularists (anyone not a far-right evangelical Protestant) and take over the government through sheer numbers."
• A Time of Reckoning for US Media. "Our democracy is at risk in part because our media is failing. Every rational voice with a platform–on social media, in newspapers, on TV–must speak up, make that clear, demand best practices. If not, unmoored from truth, we will soon lose the essence of what made the US great."